My log knows the ways of popular culture. Of the fans that brighten the flame. My log has seen television revivals come and go. My log has a Twitter account.

Behind all memes are reasons. Reasons can explain the absurd.

Twin Peaks will return. It is a miracle. But it will open a gateway.

My log knows what is to come.

Can you hear it?

I will translate.

On the first week David Lynch will be a genius. It is wondrous, the people will cry. Articles will scatter like dandelion seeds. ‘THIS is why Twin Peaks had to return’, they will say. ‘Lynch and Frost teach modern television creators how to do it.’ Much shade will be thrown at the most recent season of The Walking Dead.

On the second week, columnists and critics will agree that the show is taking its time. But this is universe building, they will argue. Perhaps the weirdness is not quite so quirky, some will suggest. It is still better than everything else on television. Listicles filled with spoilers counting the ’10 Best Things About the New Twin Peaks‘ will clog websites everywhere. People will already tire of their workmate’s references to ‘damn fine’ black coffee.

In week three there will be disparaging chatter about some of the returning actors, and whether or not they should have come back. Magazines will create spreads of the female cast members, rating them alongside photographs taken twenty years ago. Copy-editors will ask who has ‘let herself go the most?’ The male cast will be referred to as ‘distinguished’. Humanity will continue to die a little inside.

In week four conspiracy theories abound. What does that salt shaker mean?! Enough with the owls! Memes will fly wildly on Twitter. One line, taken out of context in episode two, will have become so ubiquitous and overused in daily conversation that your aunt will facebook you to ask what it means. A Guardian newspaper columnist will list reasons why this new series is exactly what Twin Peaks was once all about.

Week five will leave viewers wondering aloud whether the long pauses and abstract dialogue are intentional. People will haunt comments sections of articles loudly proclaiming that they ‘Don’t care!’ about this series. That they ‘heard’ it wasn’t that good in the first place. That they are only writing this in every comments section, on every review that they find, because they are ‘SO UNINTERESTED! SERIOUSLY!’ Critics begin to wonder whether Twin Peaks has shown its age. In the wake of Breaking Bad and Mad Men, does Twin Peaks still have ‘it‘ anymore? A Guardian newspaper columnist will list reasons why this new series is the complete opposite of what Twin Peaks was once all about.

In week six the online anger will rise. ‘Why don’t we KNOW anything yet?! Where are the answers?! We waited twenty years for THIS!?!?’ they will furiously type, despite having only binge-watched the series a month ago. Reviewers cataloguing episode summaries on websites like the AV Club will wonder why the screenwriters are concentrating on the peripheral characters. Think pieces about why they are actually important, even though they appear completely irrelevant to anything, will emerge. Some will sound nearly convincing. #Where’sAnnie?

In week seven the ‘fans’ will become apoplectic. A beloved character and actor from the original series that they have not thought about for a decade has been treated unfairly! Boycotts are threatened. #HAVETOSPEAKUPHEARINGISGONE. Capitalising on this anger, an organised conservative moral outrage group will petition Showtime to cancel the show. They will demand an investigation into whether something screened in a previous episode was too disturbing for broadcast. The FCC will issue non-committal statement about looking into the matter.

On the eighth week Saturday Night Live will do a sketch claiming that Twin Peaks is actually about Donald Trump. The White House is now the Red Room. Jeff Sessions is the Man From Another Place. Paul Ryan is an uptight nerd possessed by darkness. Steve Bannon is Bob. Ivanka, a vague beauty queen with no defined personality is ogled like a trophy to distract everyone from the evil goings on barely obscured behind the scenes. Alec Baldwin will play Trump as a dim-witted Log in an unconvincing toupee, carried around by Vladimir Putin in a dress.

My log is not amused.

Week nine will bring with it hand-wringing think pieces. ‘Lynch might just be a weird old man with singular antiquated beliefs’, they will suggest. Is he celebrating, or mocking what he thinks is ‘weird’?! Maybe Blue Velvet wasn’t that good after all.

Week ten there will be a controversy. Perhaps Denise Bryson, the transgender character played by David Duchovny, will be presented in an arguably unflattering light. Perhaps someone will rethink the use of the word ‘dwarf’ on national television. A critic will write an article titled ‘Twin Peaks Is Not A Safe Space.’ It will be unclear if this is meant to be satirical. #CancelTP

In week eleven people will have moved on to the return of Game of Thrones. Can you believe that Khaleesi did that thing that she did? It was about time! Critics will praise Game of Thrones in inverse proportion to their criticism of Twin Peaks. ‘David Lynch withholds too much!’ They will gnash their teeth. Game of Thrones will cut a dude’s head off and show you some rude bits. That’s how you tell a story!

In week twelve disparaging think pieces propagate. Everyone will be reminded that before it was cool to brag to everyone about how underappreciated Twin Peaks was, it was fun to slag off the second season, while it was still screening, for not being as great as you wanted. Endless columns will lament that Lynch is just stringing his audience along – just like before. This is why Twin Peaks got cancelled in the first place, they will say. #Waiting25Years

In week thirteen many clever, ironic people, who are all very popular and hip, will write disparaging comments about how Twin Peaks is still on television. Yawn. I forgot that was even a thing, etc. I watched that new Archie Riverdale show and it was weirder. Did you see Gravity Falls? #LodgeAComplaint

In week 14 a subsection of Tumblr fans will be disheartened when it becomes clear that the romance they were shipping is never to be. Whether this romance was between a stale box of donuts and a taxidermied deer head is obscured. #DoughADeer

On the fifteenth week, the week before it ends, fan theories will run amuck. Entire Wikis will flourish and fade daily. Click-bait websites will dangle promises of ‘WHAT IT ALL MEANS’ behind several pages of single sentence paragraphs and a confetti of pop-up ads. There will be rage from those who love the series; rage from those who ‘have never and will never watch it! Why doesn’t everyone just shut up?!’; and rage from those who believe that it is just not as good as it was when James Hurley went on that stupid road trip.

On the final week, there will be no definitive resolution. The answers it does offer will be nebulous. Much will remain obscure. Articles will be written praising a work that is willing to excite, entice, and respect its audience in such a way; others will be written calling the show a fraud. David Lynch will be labelled a scam artist; a genius; an auteur; a hack. The show will be called exploitative; ridiculous; outdated; cutting-edge. It will be both hip and derivative to hate on it; its defenders will be equal parts brave and gullible sheep. It will be the greatest; it will be the worst. Proof of the revival model; evidence of why it never works.

Twins; mirrors of one another. The darkness in the light. Inextricable.

#CUin25Years

The show will probably be magnificent; but none will be able to tell anymore. The flames will rise regardless. The smoke will blind. From the warmth of recognition to a fandom ablaze.

In the feedback is the fire. All that is good burns.

It happened to Arrested Development. To The X-Files. Even the Gilmore Girls got a working over.

This past week Australia lost one of its legends. If you are not from Australia you may not know the name John Clarke, and if you don’t, I am sorry. I am sorry that you never got to experience his brilliant work. He was the country’s greatest satirist, delivering a virtuosic four decades of comic commentary on most every aspect of modern life (we might be lousy with Hollywood-ready actors, but quality satirists are fairly thin on the ground here; someone needs to place Shaun Micallef in some kind of cryogenic stasis for protection). Clarke was also, I’m fairly certain, a genius, and by all accounts, an incredibly generous, warm, and kind human being. There is little I can say to add to the richly deserved praise that has been offered to eulogise Clarke since his shock passing, but I have grown up admiring him, and thought I should say something anyway, for whatever little it is worth…

Words fail.

That’s a sentiment that people express when someone of great importance dies. There seems to be no way to express, verbally, the loss. Language is too small, too imprecise. Ironically, it is precisely the right sentiment to embrace when hearing the tragic news of the loss of Australia and New Zealand’s greatest satirist, John Clarke. Because Clarke’s greatest strength was his way of weekly exhibiting the way that words fail.

Clarke is perhaps best known, now, for his weekly satirical take on the news, but he was, in the true sense of the word, a polymath. Over the course of his prolific career he wrote sketches, screenplays, stage plays, poems and novels; he was an actor; a director; a producer; a documentarian. He worked in film, television, theatre, and radio; and he is warmly remembered by the innumerable comedians and creators with whom he collaborated, or inspired, or personally mentored and supported behind the scenes. (Please be stunned by the breadth of his output here: http://mrjohnclarke.com/) But throughout it all, uniting his disparate creative endeavours, was an abiding fascination with the fluidity of language – its use, and more frequent misuse – and the absurdities that resulted from this rift between truth and expression.

Born in New Zealand, he became famous in the 1970s for creating and performing the character Fred Dagg, a New Zealand farmer and social commentator with several sons named Trevor (the favourite son was Trevor). Dagg was a sketch comedy character with a dry, unassuming delivery, but he allowed Clarke to indulge some deliriously nonsensical linguistic play. In the voice of Dagg he could present a shambolic 21st birthday speech that was speckled with unintended insults, that intimated debaucherous anecdotes which cannot be told, cannot be told, that escalated into a recursion of well-meaning banalities (‘You’ll all here agree with me, more or less 100 percent, in going along with me, in joining with myself, in going along with Trev’s mother and I…’), and has poor old Mrs Ballis getting caught in the wool press. Elsewhere he could recount how that story of Hamlet was just a rip off of a bit of trouble that happened up his way a few years ago to Herb Davison’s son, Trev.

When Clarke moved to Australia he was soon a principle writer and performer on The Gillies Report, a topical sketch program that employed the talents of its titular actor, Max Gilles, to impersonate sitting politicians. A few years later, Clarke would continue this political satire in the form of brief sardonic dialogues that appeared weekly, in one form or another, for the majority of the next thirty years. He and collaborator Brian Dawe would stage a mock interview that often involved Clarke playing the role of a real-world government official or public figure, someone embroiled in one of the week’s more pressing stories who was being asked to clarify their policy position, or explain the ‘official’ version of events.

IMAGE: Clarke & Dawe

Unlike the parodic style that was the signature of The Gilles Report, in his Clarke & Dawe interviews Clarke did not try to offer a traditional impression of the people he portrayed – he was never made up to look like the person he was playing, hidden beneath stupid wigs and make-up – because it was never technically that specific public figure that was the target of his incisive wit (he did, however, have an acute ear for incorporating their turns of phrase into his dialogue). Instead, what unfolded was a masterful account of the way in which the language of politics and media make a mockery of the pursuit of truth. (The ABC have assembled a fairly good selection of their sketches – they miss a few great ones, but there is a nice cross-section of their work).

Just as he had no interest in affecting an impersonation of any one figure, he was similarly nonpartisan in his mockery over the years, skewering all sides of the political spectrum – because his real target was linguistic hypocrisy. He explored the way that the logic of politicians could happily fold in on itself, how empty platitudes and a desperation to sanitise uncomfortable policy realities created a kind of pseudo speech, divorced from reason and clouded in self-delusion. As one of his dialogues explains, an ‘Australian usage of the English language’ actually means the exploitation of language for political expediency:

Bryan (interviewer): What is it called when you say something you know to be false?

John (playing the role of Lars Torders): A policy.

Ironically, the result of Clarke’s linguistic play frequently presented some of the most incisive descriptions of the world’s most pressing issues. From the ghoulish dehumanising of Australia’s asylum seeker policies, to his unsettlingly prescient critique of the modern media, either as an oversimplifying, reactionary ouroboros of Twitter clickbait (a point articulated in the immediate aftermath of the US election), or the distracted narrators of petty squabbles at the expense of legitimate analysis (such as in ‘It’s the Planet, Stupid’, a title with a crucial comma) In the United States The Wall Street Journal once even cited a Clarke & Dawe video as the best summation of the European financial crisis.

Arguably Clarke’s most celebrated single work, The Games (1998-2000), was a Logie and Australian Film Institute Award winning sitcom set behind the scenes of the preparations for the 2000 Sydney Olympic games. (It was even popular enough to be allegedly ripped off by the BBC’s Twenty Twelve.) The series, which ran for two seasons, was created and written by Clarke, in collaboration with Ross Stevenson. It was the fictional account of a handful of bureaucrats, led by Clarke, Dawe, and Gina Riley, who were heading the organising committee of the games. The series, brought to life with Clarke’s signature absurdist loops of dialogue, exposed the impossible position that such a committee was placed within.

IMAGE: The Games

It was the ideal setting for his satire: an enterprise with superficially lofty ideals, mired in contradiction, spin, and compromise. Because as Clarke revealed, beneath the grand symbolism of the Olympics as an athletic competition about human excellence, the truth was a nebulous confluence of differing agendas, one regimented by obsessive rules and protocols, propped up by advertisers dictating special treatment to push their wares, pestered by the needs of governments all over the world who were looking to bathe in the reflected glory while inoculating themselves from controversy, harassed by journalists incessantly sniffing around for stories of failure, and perpetually mere moments from disaster.

Consequentially, it was a series that allowed Clarke to explore his many avenues of satiric interest, wherever he cared to roam. It simultaneously covered finance, government, marketing, media, myth making, and office politics (the mandated team-building episode in which John’s role-playing animal is an aphid is hysterical). It catalogued the manipulation of budgets, the weathering of daily governmental point-scoring, and the placation of sporting bodies and sponsors. It was able to ponder whether anyone really wants a ‘clean’ Olympic games, confront the dismaying inability of the then-sitting Australian Prime Minister’s unwillingness to apologise to the country’s Aboriginal people, and philosophise over whether a 100 metre running track really needs to be 100 metres.

Even with its tie to the minutia of the Sydney Olympic games, for anyone outside of Australia curious about Clarke’s comedy it remains perhaps the most accessible of his work. It should be stated that it is also a series that does not get enough credit for its experimental style, which not only blurred the divide between fiction and reality – frequently employing real public figures and celebrities in its narrative – but also pioneered the now ubiquitous ‘mockumentary’ sitcom style of having a film crew act as the observers shaping the story.

Clarke’s contributions to cinema were diverse. He was a scene-stealing presence in films such as Death in Brunswick (1990), playing a laconic gravedigger, and Never Say Die (1998), playing an uncharacteristically honest car salesman. He was the voice of Wal in Footrot Flats: A Dog’s Tail (1986). He wrote film adaptations for Shane Maloney’s modern suburban comic crime noirs Stiff (which he also directed) and The Brush Off, both of which were screened as television movies in 2004.

Despite being best remembered for his work in television and film, it is perhaps in his literary output that the extent of his genius is best glimpsed. His book The Tournament (2002) (which I will admit to not yet finishing) transplants the Modernist movement into one long tennis tournament, refashioning the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers and artists into players, coaches, and commentators, playing out their intellectual disputes in a unifying sport metaphor.

He also wrote a collection of poetry, The Complete Book of Australian Verse (1989) (followed by an expanded reprinting, The Even More Complete Book of Australian Verse (1994)), which claimed to be a collection of all of the original Australian poets who had been ripped off by the English and American poets of the past. Not only did Clarke expertly mimic the style and structure of the writers he was referencing – repurposing them into figures like Dylan Thompson, Sylvia Blath, W.H. Auding and Stewie Smith – he simultaneously parodied the themes of the original while speaking to quintessentially Australian experiences.

To use but one example: Kahil Gibran, author of the mystic philosophical prose/poem The Prophet becomes Kahlihliji Bran, whose ‘prophet’ is being sought out for horse-racing tips at a local bar, waxing lyrical in absurd contradictions (‘Paradox is that which is not paradoxical / Only the living know death. Only the dead are living’) as he tries to weasel himself a free drink and escape before being called out for his nonsense.

For John Clarke, language was malleable and fragile. Powerful, capable of descriptive elegance, but too frequently made to fail; too often twisted into dissembling vapidity. And over the course of his career he exposed it all. In the chicanery of political spin, in the cold dehumanising calculus of euphemism, in the nonsensical bellyflops of the media – like few others John Clarke could see through the facade of rhetoric, past the bluster and the fraud, to the cowardice and bewilderment and grasping beneath. He dissected language surgically, and reassembled it as a ridiculous pantomime of itself, allowing even those of us blind to its tricks to be in on the joke.

And for several decades, on multiple platforms, across myriad subjects, John Clarke gifted his wit and insight and craft to the world, his skills only ever sharpening with time.

There is no satisfactory way to summarise a career and a life such as John Clarke’s.

I was hunting through my garage and I stumbled across some original William Shakespeare manuscripts. They were just sitting there, tucked underneath a box of old Robotech toys and a punctured inflatable pool. Original, signed documents by William Shakespeare, the English language’s most extraordinary poet and dramatist.

I know, right?!

Obviously, had I made a statement like this in the past, I would have been attacked by the liberal media and the intelligentsia for having nothing to prove my claims. “But don’t you live in Australia, nowhere near Stratford Upon Avon?” they would have asked. “And wasn’t your garage only built in the 1970s, centuries after Shakespeare died?” they would tediously continue. “And wasn’t this poem clearly typed out in a Microsoft Word program, when Shakespeare was probably more of an Apple guy?” On and on. Asking questions. Demanding evidence. Getting all up in my grill just because no such material has ever been discovered in four centuries of painstaking research and because of my track record of being a ridiculous, inveterate liar.

Truth is relative! Objective, demonstrably provable facts are suspect! War is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength!

I found a Shakespeare poem!

I said it. Loudly. And Angrily. So it must be true. Period.

Enjoy.

‘Alternative Facts’

When Don Trump swears that he is made of truths,

They do believe him, though they know he lies,

That he might think them some untutored youths,

Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties.

Thus they excuse the tax returns he fled,

The “proof” of Birtherism, his grand “wall”,

(That Mexico shall pay for, so he said),

And “record crowds” flooding National Mall.

Divesting his stocks, Cuban embargos,

His “charity”, vote fraud, and Russian hacks,

Bankruptcies, draft dodge, failed casinos,

Dozens of women and “unfair” attacks.

They welcome these falsehoods and plate them gold

To buy the lie that “greatness” can be sold.

So anyway, this is clearly an astonishing find. Not only do these precious artefacts blow open our entire understanding of modern literary history, but I can finally, definitively end the centuries old debate over the real identity of the great bard. Shakespeare was not secretly Christopher Marlowe or the Earl of Oxford.

He was (as I think many of us always suspected) a witch.

With his powers of prophesy, familiarity with the concept of cyber theft, and lazy, poorly-scanning rhyme structures, he was, undoubtedly, a practitioner of the dark arts.

Also, he appears to have had a Kenyan birth certificate.

And as if all that wasn’t amazing enough: there are notes and drafts for extra stanzas!

See, sonnets, by tradition, are 14 lines long, but it appears that Shakespeare had so much material to draw from in his foreknowledge of Donald Trump’s outrageous, galling, hysterical lies (oops – I mean, “post-true alterna-facts”) that he had to cut several extra lines of verse. Here are just some of the additional stanzas that didn’t make it into the final edit:

Do you like mouthing off on social media to compensate for your glaring personal inadequacies and failures – just like the President Elect?

Do you like declaring yourself awesome in public, while privately, the voices in your head insist that you are just a tasteless, talentless, ignorant, cowardly miracle of upward failure – just like the future leader of the free world?

Are you a disgruntled mutant Oompa Loompa with a fascism fetish and an inferiority complex about the size of your penis? (…Maybe that one’s just specific to Donald Trump.)

Anyway…

Yuuuuuuuge news!

Now you can buy the ‘Big Fat Trump’ excuse-a-day motivational desk calendar for 2017!

With 365 farcically un-ironic boasts, you too can cover up your every catastrophic blunder with the sweet numbing cocktail of arrogance and narcissism!

Let these pearls of wisdom show you the meaning of the term ‘Trumped-up’ as the future POTUS helps you brag your way to almost silencing the voices of self-loathing in your mind!

With classic Donald Trump ‘truth-bombs’ like:

The ONLY bad thing about winning the Presidency is that I did not have the time to go through a long but winning trial on Trump U. Too bad!

I would LOVE to explain my super secret, totally not made up plan to stop ISIS but I have a responsibility to this half finished bucket of KFC! Sad!

I LET Usain Bolt win Olympic gold medal in the 100m dash because as a reality television star, I have a responsibility to get the whole of the TV Guide crossword finished!

ONLY bad thing about having to update my IOS is that now I don’t have the time to prosecute Crooked Hillary for all those things I said she did. Too bad!

I decided – BY MYSELF – that Mexico won’t pay for my ASTONISHING chicken wire border fence! Trump Foundation charity money can pay for more than bribes and legal bills!

Will NOT sue dozen women who accused me of sexual assault! NOT because trial would reveal countless other crimes! Need time to yell at cast of Hamilton on Twitter! Sad!

I TOLD the school bully to push my head into that toilet in high school! He didn’t want to! I made him!

Show the world what a petty, weasely, delusional man-baby you are!

Every day of the year!

Also available:

I’m The President and I Believe This Shit…! A ‘funny’ coffee table book compilation of just some of the crazy conspiratorial bullshit Trump has lifted from the darkest corners of the web, white nationalist propaganda, and the headlines he half-reads on Breitbart.

The Chinese invented global warming! The election he himself won was rigged (but doesn’t need a recount)! An ‘extremely credible source’ called Barack Obama’s birth certificate fake! The state health director who saw the birth certificate was the only person who died in a plane crash! General anti-vaxing nonsense! SNL is part of a multi media conspiracy against him! He has ‘one of the highest’ IQs! He is a ‘successful’ business man!

How about a Trump U sweatshirt? Manufactured by exploiting cheap foreign labour and advertising an institution that actively preyed upon the desperate and poor, this ill-fitting apparel would be a lasting reminder of unadulterated human greed if it wasn’t so dangerously flammable!

Maybe you want to celebrate Trump’s only successful money-making tactic – licensing out his name to other (actually successful) people’s enterprises. Well why not try playing these thinly rebranded board games?

Risk: We’re All Gonna Die! edition. Defend ‘real’ America from every kind of threat, both imagined and made up! Use your super secret plan to defeat ISIS …and when you do, maybe send a copy of that plan to the White House. So the President can check that it matches his plan. Which he definitely has.

Trump Monopoly: Make America ‘great again’ (whatever that means in any given sentence) by cutting the tax rates for the top one percent. Because that always works! And while you’re there, collect $10 for hanging around the change rooms leering at the contestants in your beauty contest!

Trump Jenga: Don’t let your wall fall down or hordes of rapists and murderers will probably get through!

Trump Operation: Remove the patient’s funny bone and broken heart with tweezers, because that’s the only replacement for Obamacare!

Make racial profiling fun again when you ‘stop and frisk’ the Guess-Whos!

Trump Clue: Figure out who the Clintons had killed in the private server room with the lead pipe!

Putin Says: Do what you’re told for a belly rub and a Snausage!

‘Drain the swamp’ by seeing how many emoluments your Hungry Hippos can munch before the impeachment trial!

Trumpial Pursuit: shout the loudest and your ‘facts’ win!

Benghazi!!!

Or just enjoy a special Trump Madlib edition!

Insert random inflamatory words into the ‘news’ stories ‘people are talking about’, and you can make your own hysterical, KKK-baiting Alex Jones brand conspiracy theory nonsense to spew into the public discourse!

Make up your own black on white crime statistics! Question the validity of the election you just won! Demonise a quarter of the earth’s population by turning the Muslim faith into a vague bogeyman! Make up fun words like Pizzagate!

Watch the media scramble to try and deal with your cynical willingness to turn the highest office in the nation, and one of the proudest traditions in human history, into a horrific, embarrassing nightmare that has already outstripped every grim satire of politics ever conceived!

Prove that Kubrick was really underselling it and go the full Dr Strangelove!

Or, for the collectors, a Trump Action Figure.

Features include:

‘Realistic’ detachable ‘hair’!

Genuine terracotta skin colour

Android phone loaded to angry Twitter rant

‘Grabbing’ action

and Presidential recorded phrases like: ‘No puppet! You’re the puppet!’; ‘I moved on her like a bitch’; ‘Such a nasty woman’

WARNING: miniscule to-scale baby hands are an inhalation hazard.

This holiday season celebrate the orange cancer eating away at democracy!

Buy now!

Before Trump shares his business skills with the US economy (on the seventh bankruptcy you get a free sandwich)!

So anyway, two months ago I wrote an article about the strange furore surrounding the new Ghostbusters film, due out on July 15th. About how odd it is that a group of people who call themselves fans have gotten so worked up about a film they haven’t even seen yet. About how many of the arguments against the remake seem to be contradictory. About how ultimately it’s probably just best if everyone waits to see what the film is like before they judge it.

Personally, I hope the film is good, because I like Ghostbusters and I like things that are good.

COMMENTS

3786 Comments…

Anonymous says…

This is the most IGNORANT, OBNOXIOUS, FUCKING STUPID article I have ever read about this ‘film’!!! How fucking DARE you write your opinion on the internet! Fuck you! Go die somewhere cold and unlit.

*****************************

DogWhistle says…

This article is obviously paid for by Sony.

*****************************

Truth Speaker says…

I’m a reasonable person, but it is no exaggeration to say that this film has ruined my childhood. No, wait: raped my childhood. Yeah. This film raped my childhood. That’s more accurate. Or maybe it took an orphanage filled with children and ground them into a thin paste, and then sold that paste to elderly war veterans, and then burned all their houses to the ground. Or what’s the plural for genocide? Because that’s what this movie did. To my childhood.

*****************************

Nonplussed says…

Yawn. I don’t care about this film at all.

*****************************

Think of the Children says…

Harold Ramis would be spinning in his grave. I feel comfortable speaking for the dead Mr Ramis because I saw a couple of his films a few years ago. Show some respect!

*****************************

Anonymous says…

Everyone I talk to agrees this film will be crap. And those that don’t at first usually change their minds after I organise a dog-piling campaign to spam them with rage, unsubstantiated accusations, and rape threats. You know, healthy internet discussion.

*****************************

My Little Brony says…

My issue isn’t that they are women! It’s that they’re not men. Ghostbusters are MEN. Women aren’t men. That’s just science.

*****************************

Nonplussed says…

Seriously. Why is anyone talking about this film? Who cares? I don’t. I’m just writing this comment so that I can say how little I care.

*****************************

Nonplussed says…

YAWN!

*****************************

Anonymous says…

This film is trash. I know because I saw a trailer and no trailer has ever lied to me before. Phantom Menace forever!

*****************************

Break Timer says…

You are obviously a sad, pathetic dipshit who knows nothing about the original film. You obviously poop your pants. I have watched the original hundreds of times AND I DON’T WANT TO SEE THIS! AND I DON’T CAPITALIZE LETTERS FLIPPANTLY!

*****************************

Anonymous says…

Fuck you. Paid for by Sony.

*****************************

Sarah Lucy says…

As a woman (and definitely not a man posting under the name of two of my ex-girlfriends joined together) I am offended. I hated the trailer so much it made my completely real ovaries fall off. As a not-made-up woman I think that making a film with a squad of women is a bad idea. As a woman. And I told all of my girlfriends that while we were plaiting each others’ hair and having pillow fights. And they agreed. So there.

*****************************

Nonplussed says…

I’ve never cared less about anything in my entire life. That’s why I read every article about this film and feel compulsively obligated to write about how I don’t care even a little bit about it. Guys: yawn. I said, yawn. That’s how little I care. Because I’m that bored by it.

*****************************

FromMyColdDeadHands says…

Obama is a Gay Muslim Unicorn who wants to turn your guns into communist healthcare. Wake up sheeple!!!1!

Also: Paid for by Sony!

*****************************

Anonymous says…

Bill Murray would be spinning in his grave.

*****************************

A Wild And Crazy Guy says…

Look, my mother was a woman, and I have had at least one girlfriend, so I feel qualified to say: women aren’t funny. They can look pretty, and they can clean my room, and they can go in the female Olympics, but they can’t do comedy. That’s not sexist. It’s just a fact. None of them have ever made me laugh. And I’m not a sexist or anything.

*****************************

Number 1 fan says…

You are not a fan of Ghostbusters. A real fan would shut the fuck up and agree with me. I’m a fan. I love Ghostbusters so much I want to kick the shit out of you. That’s what love is. I will be laughing at all you fake-ass fans when this movie FAILS at the box office.

*****************************

Reasonable says…

What controversy? What oversimplification and demonization of a fictionalised opponent? The only angry comments I see are from pissed off Femi-Nazis who can’t handle that Melissa McCarthy isn’t funny. Obviously you are one of those angry lesbian man-haters who wants to force all men to watch Gilmore Girls and burn all videogames. You and your feminist cabal (I know you’re out there, I’ve been to Reddit) clearly want Ghostbusters to fail so that Hollyweird will be forced to only make Social Justice Warrior Wiccan dance party films like Frozen.

*****************************

Nonplussed says…

In theory I agree with most everything everyone is saying here. But just like I keep saying in all the forums, I care so little about this film. You can read the 42,000 word blog post I just wrote about how little I care: http//www.yawn.com

*****************************

Ladies Lover says…

I have no problem with women. I just hate reboots, and feel passionately about protecting the integrity of the original movie. Sure, Ocean’s Eleven was pretty cool. And I went to see Robocop in theatre. And Terminator. And Conan. And Spiderman. And all the Batmans. And Total Recall was okay. And Star Trek ruled. And Rise of the Planet of the Apes was amazing. And Casino Royal was the best Bond film ever. But Battlestar Galactica was lame. Starbuck is meant to be a guy. That’s why he flies in a cockpit.

For the past three months Mark Hughes over at Forbes has been the principal cheerleader, advocate, and, in his comments section replies, aggressive defence council for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Since its release Hughes has been churning out articles and interviews (like this, and this, and this), applauding the film’s opening box office as proof of its greatness (even as audiences abandoned it in droves) and progressively chastising critics, fans, and people with the capacity to perceive moving images and sounds, for not agreeing that this exploding jar of stale urine was anything less than a masterpiece.

His latest offering has been prompted by the release of the Ultimate Edition of the film, but plays out all the hallmarks of his previous defensive articles. It has the usual adolescent attempt to paint anyone who saw through the original film’s asinine plot and direction as somehow being too stupid to understand how deep it was; implies a conspiracy of hive think amongst all the critics who aren’t him; and ties itself in knots trying to explain gaping holes in the film’s plot that, even when ‘explained’ by him in great detail, still remain patently idiotic.

Even the title of his article has a self-justifying silliness that typifies much of his commentary on the film: ‘Review: Batman v Superman: Ultimate Edition Expands Story And Wins Praise’. Reading the body of the article reveals that he doesn’t actually cite anyone else’s ‘praise’; he means his own. And since he already liked the first version, by that logic literally no one’s opinion has changed. Indeed, given that he thought the original version was a masterpiece, it’s a little peculiar to see him now enthusiastically argue that this new version ‘fixes’ the original film’s problems. It presumably ‘fixes’ something that was already perfect?

But a new twist in the oratory has appeared. And it comes in the form of a word that he uses to summarise all of the criticisms that have been levelled at the film since its release:

Deconstruction.

Batman v Superman, he says, was a ‘deconstruction’ of the Batman and Superman characters, and it was that – not its quality; not its incoherent plot; not its ugly, cynical, vacuous themes – that was the reason that the film was poorly received.

It is a term that is starting to surface frequently in defence of the film. Devin Faraci, in his recent recounting of a set visit to the filming of Justice League (inexplicably also being directed by Snyder) spoke of the way that ‘deconstruction’ was being offered as a sorry-not-sorry catch-all for any complaints that had been directed at Batman v Superman. According to producer Deborah Snyder, speaking to Faraci: ‘I think the main thing we learned is that people don’t like to see their heroes deconstructed.’

Again, it’s not that people want coherent narratives and characters that behave in logical ways, or a director who doesn’t treat his audience like imbeciles and who doesn’t overtly despise everything his protagonist represents. What they ‘learned’ was audiences don’t like to be challenged. That she and her husband Zack were just too visionary for an intransigent fan base to deal with it.

And yes, I know that there is clearly some saving-face going on there, and there are few filmmakers who would be humble enough to admit to having failed in their execution (let alone ones who missed the mark this spectacularly), but it still feels grossly disingenuous to imply that the problem here was that moviegoers just want to be fed the same regurgitated narratives again and again. Particularly when it appears that there are clearly a contingent pop culture reporters eager to accept this kind of retroactive justification without reservation.

For example, in just one of Hughes’ paragraphs he uses the word four separate times, flashing it about as a lazy bit of ‘I win’ rhetoric. And in its application he uses the term to frame an audience response that tries to deny them the right to dispute its quality:

Regarding tone, the Ultimate Edition changes a lot about the film, but one thing that remains is the overall somber, deconstructive nature of the story. If that bothered you, then …. I might strongly disagree with you about this film and about your preferences for tone etc in general, but I respect that it’s your opinion and personal preferences so you aren’t “wrong” for disliking somber deconstruction of (these?) characters.

Putting aside the fact that Hughes has been arguing (sometimes quite aggressively) for the past three months that you are indeed very wrong for having that opinion, he is now saying that you are free to argue with whether you like the film or not, but you can’t argue with it being ‘deconstructive’.

Except, yes you can.

Because here’s the thing. To badly paraphrase Inigo Montoya, that word doesn’t mean what Hughes thinks it does.

Even without deep diving into the history of critical theory first articulated by Jacques Derrida that has come to be known as ‘Deconstruction’, it is clear that this is cheap obfuscation. Audiences have always embraced legitimate deconstructions of their heroic myths. One need not even look further than the superhero films that bookended BvS’s release: Deadpool and Captain America: Civil War. Here were two films that actively subverted their audience’s expectations, genuinely deconstructing the conventions of their own narratives to great effect – and both, unlike Batman v Superman, were showered with praise for doing so.

In the case of Deadpool, an overly-familiar Frankenstein revenge quest was used to riff on the rote conventions of superhero filmmaking, and the result offered, alongside all its infectious fourth-wall breaking absurdity, an oddly affecting romance, arguably one of the better X-Men films of the bunch, and a palate cleanser for years worth of carbon copy action blockbusters.

IMAGE: Deadpool

In the example of Civil War, the established ideologies of the principle characters were broken down and flipped elegantly. Military pin-up boy, Steve Rogers bucks military authority to argue for self-regulation; Downey Jr.’s antiestablishment Tony Stark signs on for governmental oversight; Black Widow, the hardened amoral spy, desperately negotiates her way through the fray, trying to hold her makeshift family together. Each acts in ways seemingly contrary to their established personality, and yet all prove to be organic extensions of their cumulative experience, deconstructing their beliefs and rebuilding them anew. And that’s before the film even gets to the (for once) ingenious villain scheme that operates, not through external peril, but personal principle, resulting in a third act unlike any Marvel film before it – one that discards the generic lets-put-our-differences-aside-and-fight-the-big-bad crescendo that audiences have come to expect, and offering a climax that plays as a brutal, raw stoush between two friends who are finally pushed beyond ethos into pure emotion.

And even before these two examples there were films like Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, an exploration of the price of order in the wake of the 21st century’s new paradigm of terrorism, or The Incredibles, a stylised analogy for familial dysfunction and the perils of fame, or even Richard Donner’s Superman, exploring the immigrant experience through colourful fantasy, and playfully satirising American ideology through Superman’s impersonation of both a human being and an icon. Numerous examples, stretching all the way back through the history of cinema. These characters have been broken down, critiqued, and reassembled since they first appeared on screen.

So suggesting that audiences can’t handle change, or claiming that Zack Snyder invented ‘deconstruction’ because he was able to indulge his objectivist fetishes after misreading Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, is ridiculous.

The real issue is that Snyder and his screenwriter Goyer had nothing to say beyond their grimdark posturing and mangled pseudo-philosophy.

Turning Superman, who has traditionally been a beacon of hope and optimism; an ideal for testing human morality on a grand scale of near-infinite power, into a whiny, narcissistic jag with a messiah fetish, is fine (actually it’s stupid, but whatever) – but you have to actually be exploring something after you do it. Otherwise you’ve just changed the character into something else for no reason. Making Batman a savage, gun-happy mass murderer might be an interesting subversion of everything he represents, if only there was some point to it beyond: ‘Lookit! HARDCORE!’ But similarly, there’s not.

You can turn Huck Finn into a vicious slave trader, turn Robinson Crusoe into a lazy shut-in, the Powerpuff Girls into three jacked-up male Mexican wrestlers with samurai blades, but none of that is ‘deconstruction’. At best it’s just mutation. It’s what DC once created ‘Elseworlds’ stories for, so they need not be beholden to the integrity of their characters and their universe. Indeed, Derrida himself specifically argued that it is not enough to simply tear something into its constituent parts and grunt nihilistically that everything can be undone; saying something is a ‘deconstruction’ does not excuse it from having to say something.

Consequently, what Batman v Superman offered felt immediately redundant. Snyder’s ‘deconstruction’ of his characters consists solely in ignoring their fundamental elements and recasting them as indulgent power fantasies. It plays more like a sketch comedy bit – like when Dora the Explorer gets remade as a gritty action film, or the Smurfs get played as a reclusive religious cult. And it is that lack of substance that renders the film a giddy, empty spectacle.

As Hughes somewhat disingenuously asserts in his article, however, taste is taste. People can like whatever they want, and for whatever reasons they want. Hughes himself obviously enjoyed the film. It was to his taste to see a psychotically homicidal character called Batman, and a sullen, impassive alien called Superman get tricked into punching each other for an hour. And that is genuinely fine (despite my clear distaste for it). But spending the next three months telling everyone else that they are wrong for not accepting this vision as their Batman and Superman, that they have bad taste for not liking the film, or that they fundamentally do not understand critical theory, is so specious an argument as to be farcical.

Speaking as someone who hated the film – both aesthetically and thematically – I think Hughes should just be happy that he enjoyed the film, and feel comforted that there are others who did too. That he could see something in it to like is a gift, not a pulpit from which to berate everyone who doesn’t agree. Because in the end, when the justification for liking something becomes so inextricably tied up in trying to prove that everyone else has missed the point, the only thing that ends up getting ‘deconstructed’ is an individual fan’s dependence upon grasping rhetoric.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an extraordinary poet. Alongside William Wordsworth, he was one of the founders of the English Romantic movement, producing exquisite works like ‘Frost At Midnight’ and ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, and ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Sadly, it is also part of his legacy that he was negatively impacted by a crippling addiction to opium. Whether the story is apocryphal or not, it is said that one of his most famous poems, ‘Kubla Khan’ was both the product of a drug-induced vision, and was unable to be completed due to the debilitating effects of his usage.

What is less well known is that Coleridge was also huge fan of binge watching high concept serialised genre fare. So even though he died in 1834, technically before the term ‘water-cooler television’ was ever uttered, he somehow managed to write the following reflection upon ABC’s sci-fi/supernatural/drama series, LOST.

I know. Weird, right?

Thus, I now present this completely real and not made up work for the first time in history:

Dharma DaOr, ‘Six Seasons In A Dream.’(A Fragment.)

by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To ‘purgatory’ plunged the flight
Of Oceanic eight one five,
Toward an island built, it seemed,
From maddened, nonsense fever dreams,
And the Twilight Zone archive.
And so six seasons came to falter
Sacrificed upon an altar
That worshiped vapid mystery boxes,
Of stall, delay and plot regressions,
Where mysticism was sour and noxious,
And characters ne’er answer simple questions.

But oh! That ceaseless hope of revelation,
A reason to the tangents, jumps and asides!
Smoke monsters, polar bears, and Dharma stations,
An entire season where they went back in time,
And lazy ‘twist’ character suicides!
That iced wagon wheel of space vortex jumping,
The ghostly cabin where Jacob was slumping,
Egyptian statues with only four toes,
Was Hurley hiding a stash of Ho Hos?
The hatches, the numbers, the hieroglyphs,
Astrophysical dimensional shifts!
And ‘mid this tumult came the writers’ assurance
Reward awaited every fans’ endurance,
Even for those who liked Nicki and Paulo.*
But six meandering years: for a dumb fist fight,
Some faked up church to greet eternal night,
And all to stuff a cork in a magic grotto.
Scarce wonder the fans, with gnashed teeth and scorn
Enflamed the internet the following morn!

No Sherlock for their witless Watson,
They wept that such a fertile tale
Adrift amongst pretentious flotsam
Had left a corpse so trite and stale:
From fuel for weekly water cooler rants
To synonym for ‘fly by seat of pants’.

A boy called Walt with psychic powers
Once unknowingly foretold:
The let-down of the following hours
The ripening set-ups left to sour
When the actor got to old.
This nonpareil ‘chosen’ one,
The Others sought obsessively
Suddenly bundled on a boat and gone
The day he’d entered puberty.
For just as Walt was painted off
The writer’s ‘plan’! their grand canvas!
Those ‘truths’ that kept the plot aloft
Mumbled away with no payoff,
Reassured by Cuse and Lindeloff
That truly it was always thus:
There ne’er was need for explanation,
T’was the ‘journey’ now, not ‘destination’,
As soon t’would be in Prometheus…

* No one liked Nicki and Paulo

(Another of Coleridge’s works, ‘Christabreaking Bad’ does not survive in its entirety.)